Although you can chechout any branch of the repository most of them are usually work in progress that is not guaranteed to work. In order to run a production ready Editor service you need to use master branch.

The code of CartoDB editor needs to run in two different modes. HTTP server mode and background jobs mode.

The HTTP server processes the http requests sent to the service and returns a response synchronously. Any ruby rack server can be used to start the editor in this mode. Some examples of rack servers are mongrel, webrick, thin or unicorn.

The background jobs mode is started with resque. In this mode the service keep polling some redis keys in order to find pending background jobs. When it finds one, it processes it and change the state of the job in redis. CartoDB uses this mode for different type of jobs like datasets imports or synchronized tables.